Betty Mae Tiger Jumper, 88, Seminole leader dies
January 15, 2011|By Anthony Man, Sun Sentinel (Florida)
Betty Mae Tiger Jumper, who became the first and only woman to chair the Tribal Council, died at her home Friday. She was 88.
Tribal officials and her family also believe she was the first Seminole Indian to graduate from high school. Born in Indiantown, she was unable to gain admission either to segregated schools for white or for black children, so as a young teen she persuaded her mother to let her leave home for an Indian boarding school in North Carolina, said her son, Moses Jumper, Jr.
She received a high school diploma and returned home with training as a nurse to help start the Indian Health Program. She became the tribe's first health director.
Mrs. Jumper was extensively involved in tribal government. She was among the original group that gathered under the Council Oak in Hollywood to create the Seminole Tribe's constitutional government and helped gain federal recognition of the tribe.
Betty Mae Tiger Jumper, 88, Seminole leader dies
January 15, 2011|By Anthony Man, Sun Sentinel (Florida)
Betty Mae Tiger Jumper, who became the first and only woman to chair the Tribal Council, died at her home Friday. She was 88.
Tribal officials and her family also believe she was the first Seminole Indian to graduate from high school. Born in Indiantown, she was unable to gain admission either to segregated schools for white or for black children, so as a young teen she persuaded her mother to let her leave home for an Indian boarding school in North Carolina, said her son, Moses Jumper, Jr.
She received a high school diploma and returned home with training as a nurse to help start the Indian Health Program. She became the tribe's first health director.
Mrs. Jumper was extensively involved in tribal government. She was among the original group that gathered under the Council Oak in Hollywood to create the Seminole Tribe's constitutional government and helped gain federal recognition of the tribe.
By Betty Mae Tiger Jumper and Patsy West, Hard cover; 199 pages University of Florida Press 2001
A Tiger by any other name
by Ramona Kiyoshk
Betty Mae Tiger Jumper is indeed a legend in her own time. The surname Jumper was added at age 24 when she married Moses Jumper, a childhood friend. The venerable lady, in her eighties, is still active in the work she loves best: helping her Seminole people to a good life, and by her own example, showing them what is possible.
Her story reads like a contrived script for the silver screen, but this is a case where fiction pales beside real life. No writer, regardless of talent, could have come up with this saga of survival against all odds: from tribal outcast to healer, leader and national icon.
Betty Mae Tiger was born in the Everglades, when Okeechobee was still the Big Lake and Indiantown was a tiny settlement in the wilderness --- home to a few Indian, white and Spanish families and a stopover for trappers and traders. The Seminoles were an insular people then. Still recovering from years of war and hardship, they shunned the white perpetrators and held the European culture and lifestyle in contempt. Their adamant resistance, after three costly battles over a forty-year period, forced the U.S. Army to withdraw in frustration. Very few Seminoles were coerced into the long march to Oklahoma in what was termed the Great Removal, Andrew Jackson’s solution to the Indian problem.
The small band of surviving Florida Seminoles, less than a thousand, guarded their freedom tenaciously, ever suspicious of outsiders, especially white people. Miscegenation was a crime punishable by death. On April 27, 1923, Ada Tiger, of the Snake clan, living in the Seminole camp in Indiantown, gave birth to a baby girl whose father was a French trapper. The child was named Elizabeth after the white woman, Sis (Elizabeth) Savage, who helped deliver her. Betty’s father was driven off and the Seminole medicine men and elders plotted to put the half-breed child to death. Half-white children were drowned or suffocated by filling their mouths with sand. Sometimes a child was left out in a field where no one could hear its cries. Fortunately for baby Betty, her grandfather had converted to Christianity and he tried to protect the child and her mother. Still the baby was in danger of being seized and killed.
Betty’s uncle took her to live with Fannie Savage, the sister of the midwife. Fannie was expecting a child and wet-nursed Betty until she could be with her own mother in a safe place. “I don’t know what my family would have done without the Savage family in those days,” Betty writes in the memoir. “Before me, all half-breed kids were killed as soon as they were born. None were as lucky as I, being born into a family that had received Christ.”
Two and a half years later, Betty’s brother, Howard, also half-white, was born. After a confrontation that resulted in gunfire and the arrest of Betty’s grandfather, the family decided they would move to the new federal reservation at Dania, now called Hollywood. Betty writes about the move. A big truck took her grandfather and their belongings and pets. The women and children followed on the train. When they reached the station in Dania, they set off on foot in the heat and dust, loaded down with bundles.
In their new home, the children were no longer in danger of being killed, but as half-breeds in a Christian family, they were still the targets of prejudice and scorn in the community.
Very few people lived at Dania in the beginning. Traditional Seminoles viewed any accommodating gesture by the government as a trap and many refused to move their families to the federal reservation. It was mainly poverty, brought about by the Great Depression and Second World War, that made more families choose to relocate and reluctantly take work as field hands and laborers. A craft industry sprang up when the women learned that tourists would buy souvenirs.
The tension between the traditional Seminoles who clung to their old ways and the new Christian converts continued. Betty Mae Jumper had by then become a committed Christian, finding peace and safety in her faith. Years ahead of her time in her thinking, she saw value in both Seminole tradition and in the Christian way of life. She would strive to meld the two paths as she set out on a life plan that included getting an education, by becoming a nurse to deliver health care to the remote areas, and finally getting elected to political office.
Betty Mae would have to overcome many barriers. Her own grandmother was against her going off to the Indian boarding school to get an education. Reading and writing was the white man’s way, they said, as was speaking English and worshiping as a Christian. In the community, the Indian kids ostracized her and her brother. The white kids who came in contact with the reservation kids called them “dirty Indians” and threw rocks at them. They were not allowed to attend the schools in the white community, and often were forced to use the back doors, reserved for blacks, of restaurants and stores. Still Betty Mae would not be discouraged.
Betty Mae Jumper would one day become known by the Seminoles as Doctor Lady.
She finished high school, got her nurse’s training and went to work with the Seminoles, visiting the remote communities. Her stories about riding around south Florida in an ancient Model T, to help the sick, injured and to deliver babies are funny and sad. Betty drove to the far-flung Seminole communities with Miss Esther Drury, the public health nurse, who “was scared to death of Indians.”
They had to change tires, coax a dead engine to life and often ended up sleeping in a disabled vehicle in the middle of nowhere. They would joke about their choice of work when they could be in a cozy job in a hospital in town. Often they were chased away from the villages and camps by gun-brandishing Seminoles who insisted they had their own medicine men. They battled superstition, witchcraft and mistrust, still they persevered.
In 1946, Betty Mae married Moses Jumper. They would have three children. In the 1940s and 1950s, Florida Indians were involved heavily in tourism, living in theme parks, where the public would pay to see them going about their everyday activities. Alligator wrestling was added to the attractions. Moses Jumper was a star alligator wrestler, often earning more than $100 a day in tips.
Betty Mae’s other accomplishments included creating the first tribal newspaper, the forerunner to the Seminole Tribune, getting elected as the first female Chief of the Seminole Tribe, heading the Seminole Communications department, and receiving an honorary doctorate from Florida State University. President Richard Nixon appointed her to a two-year term on the National Indian Opportunity Council. As well, Betty Mae has authored three books, made recordings of Seminole legends and history and continues to work toward the betterment of her people. She is a strong disciple of Christ. It was Betty Mae who insisted the tribal flag include: In God we trust.
This book is recommended reading. A single review cannot do it justice. It is a true story filled with hair-raising escapes, colourful adventures, in a sweeping landscape of a people and a place that transcends time, history and imagination.
NOTE: Prior to the release of A Seminole Legend: The Life of Betty Mae Tiger Jumper, Peter Gallagher, former senior writer for the Seminole Tribune, was quoted: “What a read it should be. She's a human history book, born out in the swamps -- and today she has an honorary doctorate from Florida State University."
From the website: http://www.seminoletribe.com/bettymae/today.shtml
